Embracing Complexity
Exploring the conditions for strategic design
It’s great to be back. I hope summer is treating you well. While summer might be known for slower, simpler times, our world is feeling much more complex.
Complexity is one of those difficult words that means a great deal, but is also used in ways that often obscure understanding rather than clarify it. That’s why we’re going to start this new learning series on Censemaking with a look at what’s at the heart of living systems: complexity.
Leaders across health, education, and social services find themselves navigating unprecedented levels of complexity, a condition that arises from multiple factors coming together simultaneously. Complexity isn't a temporary crisis; it's a permanent condition of modern organizational life that requires fundamentally different approaches.
In the first of a series of weekly lessons on strategic design for complex times, we examine the foundational conditions that affect our health and social systems: complexity. For more on this, you can visit the posts on Censemaking and LinkedIn (see here) as we go.
Understanding Complexity: It’s More Than Just "Complicated"
Complexity arises when things are connected in ways that make outcomes unpredictable. Complexity comes from three key conditions:
Many different things are happening at once—different actions, forces, and influences—all within the same situation.
These things change at different speeds and intensities, often shifting in response to what’s happening in the system.
As everything interacts, new patterns emerge, and these changes can reshape how the entire system functions.
Think of complexity like weather rather than a machine—you can't control it with a switch, but you can learn to read the patterns and respond wisely.
Unlike complicated systems, where you can figure things out by tracing clear causes and effects, complex systems are full of uncertainty and unexpected changes. Once a complex system changes, there’s no going back—just like how people grow and change in ways that can’t be undone.
For leaders accustomed to traditional planning methods, shifting from linear thinking to identifying patterns can be one of the most challenging mental adjustments to make.
Why Traditional Strategy Falls Short
Traditional strategic plans and goal-setting break down in times of transition, uncertainty, and disruption. Organizations continue to push for linear models, such as waterfall planning, SMART goals, and SWOT analyses, but these tools were designed for predictable environments. Many planning models assume that we can predict and control what will happen, but in complex systems, that's rarely the case. We can, at best anticipate changes.
The limitation isn't just methodological—it's philosophical. These approaches assume we can map the future from the present, but complexity means that precise prediction is fraught with issues. When the path ahead keeps shifting, we need fundamentally different capabilities.
Strategic Design: Working With, Not Against, Complexity
Strategic design blends systems thinking with creative problem-solving, providing leaders with ways to work with uncertainty rather than fight it. Strategic design considers the dynamic, systemic, and emergent context in creating adaptive, flexible, and vision-oriented plans.
This approach focuses on four key elements:
Framing the Problem: Taking the time to ask the right questions before jumping to solutions. Instead of "What's the solution?", try "What's really going on here?"
Engaging People: Bringing in diverse perspectives from those with lived and professional experience. Leaders create the conditions for designs to be effective by generating organizational and social settings where people can ask questions, explore options, share ideas, and connect those together to create emergent possibilities. Engaging diversity in complex systems is a vital means to understanding systems, not just a social policy based on identity.
Making and Testing: Using quick experiments or pilots to learn what works in real settings. A minimum viable strategy approach builds a strategy in a set of steps, rather than a massive, singular plan.
Reflecting and Adapting: Making time to learn from what's happening and adjust as needed. In complexity, feedback isn't noise—it's data.
The Leadership Mindset Shift
Navigating complexity isn't just an intellectual challenge—it's deeply emotional. Leaders frequently encounter ambiguity, shifting demands, and pressure to make decisions without clear answers, which can trigger fear, anxiety, or defensiveness.
The shift requires moving from a fixed mindset that seeks control and certainty to a growth or complexity-informed mindset that accepts that not everything can—or should—be known in advance. Leaders who model curiosity, humility, and openness create psychological safety for others, allowing teams to adapt, experiment, and contribute more fully to navigating complexity together.
This transition involves shifting from a steady problem-solving mode to one that focuses on pattern recognition and sensemaking. It's about becoming comfortable with treating ambiguity not as a threat but as a space for learning.
Beyond Tools: Creating Conditions for Emergence
Complexity is difficult to conceive complexity in systems within our minds alone; we need to visualize our systems and think beyond two-dimensional charts and tables. Frameworks like Cynefin, Panarchy, and Wardley maps can help, but they're not magic solutions. These frameworks are not tools, but facilitators for seeing, sensing, and contextualizing things to enable strategic action to take place.
Complexity-oriented leadership is about enabling emergence and responsiveness in your organization. This means creating the organizational conditions where new patterns can emerge and be recognized, where feedback can be quickly processed, and where adaptation can happen at the speed of change itself. It also means recruiting for, supporting, and nurturing ways of working together to share, learn, and make decisions in ways that go beyond hierarchy and bureaucracy to being more adaptive, responsible and closer to where the decisions are being felt.
Getting Started: A Practical Approach
You don't need to have all the answers—just a way to learn as you go. Here's how to begin:
Zoom Out: Map out who and what is involved. Ask: What forces are interacting? Look for the connections and influences that might not be immediately obvious.
Zoom In: Where are people feeling the pressure most? What are the patterns or signals? Focus on where the system is showing stress or unexpected behaviours.
Start Small: Try a low-risk experiment. Learn from it. Build from there. Use a minimum viable strategy approach that allows for rapid learning and adjustment.
Embed Learning: Lightweight evaluation systems that are oriented to facilitating feedback loops are needed. Build sensemaking into your regular practices.
The Sailing Metaphor: Navigation Over Control
Sailing is an example of working with the literal tension between the context (the water and the wind) and the vessel navigating both (the boat). Like skilled sailors, leaders in complex environments need to develop capabilities for reading conditions, adjusting their approach, and making progress even when they can't control the winds.
Strategy planning becomes a form of strategy making—creating guides that are useful and directed, but also open to modification and interpretation that's circumstance-suited.
Conclusion: Complexity as Invitation, Not Obstacle
Complexity doesn't have to be a roadblock—it can be an invitation to design smarter, more adaptive strategies. At its core, strategic design enables you to design with complexity, rather than against it.
The leaders who thrive in our complex world won't be those who try to impose order through force of will or detailed planning. They'll be those who learn to read the patterns, create conditions for emergence, and navigate skillfully through uncertainty toward their intended destinations.
Whether you're sailing, hiking, or trying to address the effects of chronic diseases in your patients and communities, understanding complexity is one of the best places to begin. The journey begins with accepting complexity as a natural part of life and developing the skills to work with it effectively.
Like skilled sailors who can make progress even in turbulent seas, leaders who embrace strategic design approaches can navigate complexity with confidence, creating positive change even when the destination isn't entirely clear and the path keeps shifting beneath their feet.
Hop on board. We’re sailing for interesting seas.
Great post